What do you do if lunch
cooked by a stranger arrives on your desk? Simple, you tuck into the fare laden
with expectancy and savor the inviting flavor, only to have pangs of curiosity
disguised as hunger haunt you the next day. Thus starts ‘The lunchbox’ with an innocuous event of misplaced meals bringing
together two disparate lives with a promise to alter their courses forever.
The movie is rooted into
the mundane; routine events with the potential to change forever lives which
have long settled into a dreary rhythm. The overwhelming shadow of Mumbai the
metropolis looms large over the characters, her invisible hands pulling strings
for hope to peek, only to dash them cruelly. This mood of despondency is
however regularly punctuated with optimism; Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s character is
glib and opportunist, a byproduct of a lifetime of deprivation, yet he retains
an affection for an old widower ambushed by an unlikely fantasy. Nimrat Kaur
plays the spurned bride with aplomb, displaying numerous nuances of a life
lived in constant disappointment. Culinary skills are her only forte with which
she attempts to reignite her marriage with a disembodied voice of an elderly neighbor as her confidant and who herself has a woeful story to tell. Human tragedy in The Lunchbox does not pervade the
storyline with baleful melancholy; wit is used adroitly to convey the message
that hope springs eternal. Sample the story of Nimrat’s neighbor who the
audience never sees: her comatose husband, seemingly lost to the world,
nevertheless ignites hope, at least in his wife’s mind by his catatonic
fixation with the ceiling fan. An appliance thus provides sustenance and
purpose to lives which otherwise would have drowned in hopelessness.
The cinematography employs
muted tones, transporting the audience back to a different era where love still
had romance and the forgotten art of writing letters a means to bring two
divergent lives together. The narrative depends heavily on moods and emotions
conveyed by gestures and expressions; Irrfan Khan glancing around covertly
before pocketing the amorous missive depicts the dilemma of one who is torn
between societal norms and his yearning to rekindle his life. The tenderness
between the two protagonists is deliciously understated; it transports you back
in time where love was beholden to a union of minds with one drawing strength
from the other. Sample the scene where Nimrat is troubled by a suicide which
has a disturbing semblance to her own life, plagued by a straying husband. Her
sense of foreboding is assuaged by the deadpan humor of Irrfan who relates a
somewhat bawdy account of his privates being violated in Mumbai’s stuffy local
trains; a case of comedy of errors with which he conveys that things are not
always what they seem.
The movie is a celebration
of your senses as evidently conveyed by using food as a device with which the
protagonists connect. Nimrat tries to win back her husband by pouring out her
passion in her cuisine and unwittingly ends up firing the will of a much older
man’s desire to salvage a life rendered cold by loss and tedium. Irrfan is
expectedly consummate in his portrayal of an ageing and cantankerous accountant
wary of displaying any affection which threatens to derail his selfish
existence. I cannot recall any other Indian movie which uses something as basic
yet powerful a tool as food to trigger a chain of events which transforms
lives. The earthy visuals of an Indian kitchen and the archetypal images of a
stodgy day in a dull Indian ‘daftar’ being livened up at lunch hours by
overworked clerks smacking their lips over a sumptuous meal defines this movie.
I hope this is a watershed in Indian cinema where basic indulgences are deftly
used to create a connect with the audience.
The
lunchbox is in a way an evocative throwback
to the Ray era and his Calcutta trilogy where the ‘everyman’ is the subject in
the backdrop of the all-encompassing metropolis. Director Ritesh Batra’s
treatment of such quintessential urban topics displays promise even though the
conclusion is somewhat drawn out and lacks the tautness of the first half.
Irrfan’s holds the film together with his powerhouse performance; his dry wit
flashing like a samurai’s sword. Watch this one for its celebration of life and
hope as much for its pathos of life in a big city
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